People hearing without listening

Posted on by brucehhackett

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about misunderstood lyrics, offering a couple dozen hilarious examples of how people hear one thing while the vocalist is actually singing something else.  Our sense of hearing is, to say the least, imperfect.  Depending on how closely we’re listening, and how clearly the speaker or singer is enunciating, we fairly often mishear what’s being said or sung, and we conclude incorrectly what we think we heard.

misheardlyricsThe official term for this is a mondegreen, coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in 1954.  As a young girl, she enjoyed listening to her mother read aloud from a book of 17th Century Scottish poems, one of which included the line, “They had slain the Earl of Moray, and laid him on the green.”  Wright misinterpreted this as, “They had slain the Earl of Moray, and Lady Mondegreen.”  Even after she learned of her error, she decided she preferred her version, and chose to call this phenomenon a mondegreen.

At the bottom of this column is a Spotify playlist that includes some of the recordings that people have misheard over the years.  If you’re a subscriber, you can listen to the whole song and hear the lyric in question.  (If not, well, all you get is a random 30-second sample that may not include the relevant line.  If you’re a music lover, a Spotify subscription is well worth the modest $10-a-month investment.) Read More

Fill my eyes with that double vision

Posted on by brucehhackett

In this day and age, with downloadable music, iPods and such, it seems at least quaint, and at most obsolete, for me to discuss the concept of The Double Album.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, and into the ’80s, artists typically released new music as single albums — i.e., somewhere between seven and 14 songs that fit nicely into the 40-minute limitations of a two-sided vinyl LP.

But now and then, artists found it necessary to release a double album — twice as much music, on two discs, spread over four sides.

Sometimes, these packages were bloated, self-indulgent and full of filler.  They were testaments to a band’s overinflated egos winning out over the common sense of the record label, who no doubt pleaded, unsuccessfully, for the artist to pare down the abundance of material to something more workable and consumable…like a single album.

Often, these double albums were “Live in Concert” affairs.  The artists defiantly claimed that, to duplicate the experience of a live show, the recording had to be of comparable length — closer to two hours rather than a mere 40 minutes.  The problem was, they often didn’t have enough great songs to fill two hours, in concert or on record, so they would take a decent 4-minute tune and turn it into an interminable 12-minute track full of excessive soloing and irritating crowd applause (think Humble Pie’s “Rockin’ the Fillmore,” Dave Mason’s “Certified Live” and Peter Frampton’s mega-seller “Frampton Comes Alive!”).  Sometimes this was acceptable if you were attending a show, but at home, on the album, the listener often found it grating and quickly lost interest.

The real rarity was the double album of new studio recordings that was truly worthy of its length.  It was hard enough for many bands to create enough quality stuff to fill a single LP.  Seriously, how many albums in your collection were great from beginning to end, with nary a dud song?  Maybe 10-15% at best?  For a band to think they could come up with 90+ minutes of great music in one fell swoop was not a challenge to be accepted lightly. Read More